This is an edition of the Books Briefing, our editors’ weekly guide to the best in books. Sign up for it here.Two years ago, for an event in Mexico City, the Canadian novelist Miriam Toews was asked to compose an essay about why she writes. Her unsuccessful attempts to answer the question turned into her new memoir, A Truce That Is Not Peace, which, as Kristen Martin wrote this week, sees her reckoning with the suicides of her father and her sister, and examining the forces that made her an author. She turns to other writers’ work for help, and finds one poet’s reflection on grief and childhood especially useful. First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic’s books section:“June,” a short story by Daniel J. O’MalleyA new theory puts parenting at the center of human evolution.“Irresistible Contentment,” a poem by Prageeta SharmaThat essay is the poet Christian Wiman’s “The Limit,” which gives Toews’s memoir its title. In it, Wiman looks back on the violence that marked both his childhood in West Texas and his family’s history, and seems to gather that his past made his writing career inevitable. His conclusion is somewhat counterintuitive, because when he first began reading poetry, in college, he believed that “it had absolutely nothing to do with the world I was from.” But he no longer believes that assumption was entirely accurate. In poetry, he found something kinetic, and he relished “the contained force of its forms, the release of its music,” which seemed to reflect the tumult of his youth. As a writer, Wiman describes “reinventing” his past, hoping to turn it into a self-contained story that he could fully leave behind.Martin points to a different motivation in Toews’s case. In the years since the deaths of her father and sister, writing has been a way to continue her conversations with them. Toews first began composing prose when she was a teenager and her older sister, Marj, asked her to send her letters. Decades later, after Marj’s suicide, Toews continues putting pen to paper in search of some kind of organized story. Maybe that’s why “The Limit” so moved her—in his essay, Wiman suggests that writing might allow us to “remember the dead without being haunted by them, give to our lives a coherence that is not ‘closure,’ and learn to live with our memories, our families, and ourselves.” Toews seems to understand that even if no sense can be made of her relatives’ deaths, and even if she may never find peace, literature remains a way to honor her past. It is also, as Martin observes, a small, incomplete way to keep her family—and herself—alive.Pierre Bonnard / Barnes Foundation / Bridgeman ImagesThe Hardest Question for a Writer to AnswerBy Kristen MartinFor Miriam Toews, writing is a way of living with the unspeakable.Read the full article.What to ReadEating Stone: Imagination and the Loss of the Wild, by Ellen MeloyWhen Meloy, a desert naturalist, felt estranged from nature, she sought to cure it by stalking a band of bighorn sheep for a year in Utah’s Canyonlands wilderness. She begins in winter and feels cold and clumsy. She envies the bighorns’ exquisite balance as she watches them spring quickly up cliff faces. She feels “the power and purity of first wonder.” Meloy’s writing is scientifically learned—beautifully so—but this book does not pretend to be a detached study. When she hikes alongside these animals at dawn, she aches to belong. She fantasizes about being a feral child they raised. At first, the band is indifferent to her project. But animal by animal, they begin to let her into their world. To follow her there is to experience one of the sublime pleasures of contemporary American nature writing. Meloy gives an account of their culture, their affections for one another, even their conflicts. All these years after my first read, I can still hear the crack of the rams’ colliding horns echoing off the red rock. — Ross AndersenFrom our list: The one book everyone should readOut Next Week📚 Trip, by Amie Barrodale📚 Night Watch, by Kevin Young📚 The Season, by Helen GarnerYour Weekend ReadIllustration by Akshita Chandra / The Atlantic. Source: Getty.If the University of Chicago Won’t Defend the Humanities, Who Will?By Tyler Austin HarperDepending on whom I asked, the move to scale back humanities doctoral programs is either a prudent acknowledgment of the cratered job market for tenure-track professorships and a wise attempt to protect the university’s humanities division from looming financial and political risks, or it is a cynical effort, under cover of the Trump administration’s assaults, to transfer resources away from “impractical,” unprofitable, and largely jobless fields (such as, say, comparative literature) and toward areas that the university’s senior leadership seems to care about (such as, say, STEM and “innovation”). One faculty member I spoke with mentioned a consulting firm that was brought on to help Chicago as it considers changes to its humanities division, including possibly consolidating the departments from 15 down to eight. Many professors worried that the move to impose uneven changes—reducing admissions in some while halting them in others—may be an attempt to create circumstances that will ultimately make it easier to dissolve the paused programs. “Let no good crisis go unleveraged,” Holly Shissler, an associate professor in the Middle Eastern Studies department, said with a dark laugh. “You engineer a situation in which there are no students, and then you turn around and say, ‘Why are we supporting all these departments and faculty when they have no students?’”Read the full article.When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.Sign up for The Wonder Reader, a Saturday newsletter in which our editors recommend stories to spark your curiosity and fill you with delight.Explore all of our newsletters.